Speak Up- Kōrerotia15 February 2017

Bilingualism in a single language-dominant society

Male This programme was first broadcast on Canterbury’s community access radio station Plains FM 96.9 and was made with the assistance of New Zealand on Air.

Fejawad Coming up next conversations on human rights with “Speak Up” – “Kōrerotia”, here on Plains FM.

Sally E ngā mana,E ngā reo,E ngā hau e whāTēnā koutou katoaNau mai ki tēnei hōtaka: “Speak Up” – “Kōrerotia”.

Tune in as our guests “Speak Up”, sharing their unique and powerful experiences and opinions and may you also be inspired to “Speak Up” when the moment is right.

I’m your host Sally Carlton, and today we’re going to be talking about bilingualism - and I guess also multilingualism - in a single language-dominant society, in this case particularly New Zealand. We’ve got four guests in the studio: Anya Filippochkina, Jawad Arefi, Una Cunningham and Jin Kim. Now, if you could all introduce yourselves please, tell us a little bit about yourself and what’s your background in relation to languages? Jawad, how about we start with you?

Jawad OK. I’m an engineer but happen to teach Farsi language to Afghan kids in Hagley College and that’s how I came across to multilingualism mingling with Afghan kids, mainly Afghan kids but some other Farsi speakers. That’s me.

Sally How long have you been in New Zealand?

Jawad I moved in here 2008, so nine years now.

Sally And how long have you been involved with the Farsi school?

Jawad Since 2010, so six or seven years.

Sally Fantastic, I’m sure we’ll learn a lot more about it and the lovely kids that you teach; they are so cute. Anna?

Anya I’m involved in languages because language is my job, actually. I have a master’s degree in teaching Russian language in literature and when I came to New Zealand in 1998 - I can’t believe! - I couldn’t speak English and that’s why I started to teach Russian. In 2000 we established our Russian Cultural Centre and Russian school and since that time I am

teaching Russian language.

Sally And you are also involved in CLANZ [Community Languages Association of New Zealand]?

Anya Yes CLANZ, I think it’s a very important part of my activities. In 2007, I decided to make a little research how many community schools we have in Christchurch and together the City Council, these other organisations we started to do the professional development of community language teachers programme. It was an amazing experience and all principals of the community schools came together and we met each other for the first time and they shared our experience which is very, very important. Since that time, I started to contact with CLANZ - Community Languages Association of New Zealand - and we made a number of programmes and the last year I think it was very successful year because after the earthquake we decided to continue this programme which is very successful and thanks to the university to our supporters, City Council, we succeed in three very successful seminars of community language teachers which gives us the opportunity to share our experience, our knowledge and just we are crazy people who wants to contribute something to the society. And we believe we are living in 21st century, impossible to live in a monolingual country.

Sally And I’m sure we’ll learn a lot more about that as we go through. Jin?

Jin Kia ora, annyeonghaseyo, I’m Jin. I’m originally from Korea and I have lived here in New Zealand for over 14 years. I am a PhD candidate at University of Canterbury with a focus on heritage language maintenance and transmission and I am working with Una, who is my supervisor, and Professor Janette King.

Sally Perfect, thank you very much. And you’re also involved in Korean Language School?

Jin I used to, not any more.

Sally But you are raising two young kids, is that correct?

Jin Yes they were born in Korea but raised here in New Zealand and in the UK for a while.

Sally So it will be interesting having your perspective as a parent, I think.

Jin Thank you.

Una I’m Una Cunningham. I’m a specialist in learning and teaching languages at the University of Canterbury and I have raised four children with two languages myself in Sweden - Swedish and English - and I research heritage language transmission. We have a journal of home language research and a number of doctoral students who are working in the field,

including Jin here.

Sally Both Jin and Una, you mentioned the term ‘heritage language.’ I’d be interested to maybe tease out that a wee bit. Is it the same, for example, as ‘community language’ which is what CLANZ uses, also perhaps ‘minority language’? What are the difference between these various terms?

Una There’s a lot of overlap between the meanings really but there are some areas at the edges where they are used a bit differently. So I think generally when Anya talks about ‘community language’ it’s something you could also call ‘heritage language’ or often perhaps even ‘home language’ as well but a ‘home language’ needs to be spoken in the home and a ‘community language’ doesn’t necessarily need to be spoken in the home - you can imagine the situation where the parents don’t speak the language in the home but the child anyway learns the language in the community school - and ‘heritage language’ is sometimes referring to a situation where the language belongs to the family but hasn’t been spoken for a number of generations, that’s often the way it’s used for example in the United States where you have people who talk about their Russian as a heritage language, maybe Russian hasn’t been spoken for two or three generations. It’s quite variable.

Sally Another terminology question that I have is, if we’re talking about people speaking multiple languages - first language, second language, mother language, mother tongue, native language - and the terminology around those different categories.

Jawad Well to be honest, well I have to add after introduction to the guests I have to go back to school probably to do some studies in education and learning languages and teaching languages, I’m not a professional teacher but from a normal person from public and an immigrant as well. To me… well, putting ‘heritage language’ aside, I always had a perception that heritage language is a language not necessarily from a family but for example coming from Afghanistan there are some removed villages in Afghanistan whose people speak a language that no-one probably have heard of it before and is a very small communities that may speak that language and I always thought that because this is kind of a remaining language from probably in ancient times that probably no-one has paid attention to that, I thought that is a heritage language. And for us, mother language is what we learn there and when we came here as a ‘community language’ then because we Afghans speak a version of Persian that is different from Persian spoken in Iran and Persian spoken in Tajikistan. When we gather here in New Zealand as foreigners we probably have some communities which have interconnection then we share through English although our language is slightly different but has the same basis, combine it with some flavour of English that becomes community language and we all understand each other talking in Persian and we’ve got native language that to me I thought that talking to… I felt in New Zealand, many people are coming, migrating, there has been

some native people like Māori people here, te reo becomes the native language of the country and then the rest of the people are speaking their community languages. So this was my perception but I would be really keen to hear from professionals that… they can be different and they can overlap but the terminology can be quite complicated sometimes.

Una Definitely some. I think native really, a ‘native language’ refers to a language you are born with, that’s the native part so that’s not necessarily… well, people can have more than one native language, they can have more than one first language so that my children growing up in Sweden for example had both Swedish and English as the first language and then other children perhaps who grow up in a family where both parents speak Farsi would perhaps have Farsi as their first language. And later they would learn English, come in contact with English as they go out into early childhood education and school and that would be their second language and they might actually not develop native-like skills in Farsi if later on they don’t get a good chance to practice it as their language develops but they might well develop native-like skills in English. They probably will if they live in New Zealand.

Jawad It’s possible to have two first languages?

Una Yes.

Jawad So all again coming from public, talking to children in our school their first language is English no matter how much their parents talk in Farsi at home but the way they think, they structure the sentence and even the whole ideology of talking and communicating - it’s English that drives the conversation although they are speaking Farsi with us but at the back of their mind they’re talking to English in some part of their mind, they’re translating into Farsi and we can really feel that. And so to me I thought that the environment can have that much effect that you can have only language as your first language but that’s very interesting to know that we can basically…

Una It depends what you put into the word ‘first’ - if you mean first as in the strongest or if you mean first as the one that came before the others. A linguist usually means the one that came before the others is your first language so your second language can later become your strongest language but not your first language and your second language can be the one you are a native speaker of and not the first language even though… It’s kind of messy, with migrants it just gets messy.

Sally I think this is probably something we’ll be exploring a lot: how do multiple layers, I suppose, of language come on top of each other, particularly when you’ve migrated, particularly as you are growing up in New Zealand. I just want to clarify before we go any further in this conversation is that when we are speaking community or heritage languages in New Zealand we’re not referring to te reo or New Zealand

Sign Language, is that the case?

Una Yes.

Sally Yes so I think we’ll do another show where we look specifically at those two but this is looking at other languages. So it might be time then for our first break and Jawad, you chose a song which is actually quite perfect given what you’ve been talking about called ‘Persian is Our Heart.’ Any particular reason for that?

Jawad Well first time I heard this song was probably three or four years ago so the poet has died maybe 15 years ago. I got the invite to come to this programme, just at the back of my mind said I have heard the song about the Persian language and I chose this song because the poet was an Afghan, the singer is Iranian and the guys who were playing the instruments are from Tajikistan so they are showing the common theme at the back that we are all speaking the same language, the thing that is kind of a glue stitching these three countries together as people who speak the same language with different dialects.

Sally Beautiful. Well here it is then: ‘Persian is Our Heart.’

MUSIC – “PERSIAN IS OUR HEART”Sally Welcome back to “Speak Up” – “Kōrerotia” with Sally Carlton, your host.

We’ve got Anya, Jawad, Jin and Una and we’re discussing bi- and multilingualism in New Zealand. I thought we might kick this section off by thinking about what are some of the benefits, the advantages of being able to speak multiple languages, particularly in a society that’s predominantly monolingual. I open the floor to whoever would like to jump in.

Jin I would like to share findings from my study. I carried out interviews with New Zealand-born Korean immigrant children, as well as their parents, about what is the advantages they feel being as a bilingual speakers for both Korean and English. They said, particularly children said, they have more advantages for making career pathways because parents might be concerned that if they are focusing on speaking their heritage language which is Korean for this context, their English language acquisition might inevitably effect on their academic skills but it turned out the other way. So these Korean immigrant children, they have really good grades, marks on their NCEA levels and they haven’t had any language difficulties especially English language so it went really well. So I would recommend they should focus on speaking their heritage language at home.

Sally So your advice is, if Korean for example is the children’s first or native language, speaking it in the home is not detrimental to their English language acquisition?

Jin That’s right.

Sally Fantastic.

Jawad I think with the person can speak two languages or more he is becoming another person, it is again the way we think when we communicate can be quite different in each language and when I look at people who are able to speak more than one language I think they have two ways of approaching, tackling the problem or communicating with one person and it’s how I think the brain works and how powerful it is that has that much capacity that no matter your knowing one language or two, still functioning at the same level. So it’s just the reserve capacity in the brain that most of the migrant children are using, that part of the brain but probably monolingual students are not using that part of the brain and it’s just not functioning and I guess that’s why I’ve read in the papers that bilingual people have less chance of getting dementia when they are older and that’s because they are using that part of the brain. It’s like muscles, if you use muscles, work out, you are healthy; if you don’t, you will be weak very soon. So I think it totally makes sense to speak more than one language.

Sally I think there are other cognitive and developmental benefits as well.

Anya Absolutely. I think language is impossible to learn without understanding or trying to understand the culture, different culture. Because we are sitting here - I don’t know about you [Sally] - but all of us, we are migrants.

Sally Me too, actually.

Anya You too? Congratulations. So everybody who is coming to new country experienced cultural shock so how we can learn another language, it’s something different from our culture, our background and during this effort to learn another language I think we can understand other people better because how difficult it is to learn another language but also to accept others because we can understand them better. I have in front of me the Star newspaper and probably you see our changing face of Christchurch, this is the future of Christchurch. And New Zealand actually is a country of migrants, it always will be and understand each other and respect each other, it’s a very healthy thing and without learning language no matter how fast we can learn the language, how fluent we are, at least we try to understand other person and this is very important.

Sally Well we talk about languages being so crucial to identity, don’t we, so taking that a step further and being able to understand other’s identities as well.

Anya And we come into new country, I couldn’t bring with me anything and only important thing I brought with me was the language. And so this is up to society, I think, and to family, first of all, to decide are we going to continue to keep our heritage language important things from our

country, our culture or we have to learn English and that’s it, integrate to new life.

Una I think there’s a difference really between the migrant who comes here and needs to think about keeping their language skills going, and passing the language onto their children because for the next generation having access to the heritage language, to their parents’ language or parent language is hugely valuable. It’s valuable on the individual level, just as you say Sally, that there are these cognitive benefits but it’s also valuable on the relationship level and on the level of identity. And Jin’s research has shown that people do suffer if they don’t grow up with competence in their parent’s language. It’s also valuable on the level of the family so that the extended family, the grandparents back in the old country can speak to the little children here otherwise the family really falls apart and the people back home feel that the next generation are totally lost to them and for the young person growing up here it means also that they don’t have access to go back to their parent’s home… well they might visit but they can’t just slip in and be part of that society in the way that they could if they had access to the language and culture. But it’s also important as something for New Zealand; New Zealand needs multilingual people because the world is multilingual. So the transnational families who are in New Zealand are a huge asset for the country.

Jin Because of this reason, Minister of Education promoted internationalisation capability in 2014 that means the Minister of Education promotes especially secondary school children to learn more of another foreign language to become a global citizen and that may enhance their cultural awareness as well as this may bring a benefit to society so it’s working that way.

Sally So I guess one of the questions then is: you have mentioned the Ministry of Education getting on board, have any of you in your professional or personal capacities come across much resistance to promoting the idea of bi- or multiculturalism?

Jawad Working in an engineering consultancy I think with the globalisation and internationalisation, I think even the companies think as an opportunity to provide services to other countries and they see this as an opportunity to employ people who speak that country foreign language and they know the culture, they also showcase it as oh we have these bright people from your country who speak your language so they’re trying to compete in this world to get jobs overseas. So I think from professional side of the work, I think in New Zealand they embrace bilingualism, they encourage it.

Una We do a lot of outreach work through the Better Start project which is led by Professional Gail Gillon and Profession Angus McFarlane at the University of Canterbury as well as at the universities we actually visit early childhood education centres and talk to them about ways they can enhance the linguistic landscape, the visible writing on the wall to

encourage and welcome and value the languages that the families of the children have with them and what we see there is that the early childhood educators are very interested in how they can support the children, want to know lots of things and they do have a lot of questions from the parents. For example, will it hurt my child if I speak my language? And of course we’re able to give them the answer “No it won’t, do speak your language, that’s the greatest gift you can give your child.” So people are concerned but were welcoming of information. There isn’t a lot of public information available.

Sally Which might be a good point to do a little plug for your website and blog, actually because I had a look and there’s fantastic information on there.

Una Thank you, yes we have a website called Growing Up With Two Languages which is available at http://twolanguages.canterbury.ac.nz/ and we also have a Facebook page Growing Up With Two Languages so I welcome everybody to “like” that page. We give all the information there about the public lectures and workshops that we hold.

Sally Una, you mentioned that encouraging children to speak their first language doesn’t harm their English. Is there any evidence that it can actually help develop English language competency as well?

Una Really growing up in New Zealand you don’t need to be worried about children’s English. I had one student who had a baby, the mother was speaking French to the baby and she said if my child grows up monolingual it’s not going to be in French. The children get swamped with English, there’s English all around them, they hear English all day, they are using English all day, they are developing English in the schools, the teachers are excellent at meeting the needs of these children. Growing up with more than one language does make a child more aware of language, it makes them more understanding that things can have more than one name and that’s a nice advantage, it’s kind of a cognitive maturity that these children get at an earlier age than other children. But they don’t need help with their English, their English will be just fine.

Sally That’s more or less what I thought.

Jin And some of my child participants said when I carried out interviews with them, they said because their ability to speak another language apart from speaking English here that when they learn another language or including English language acquisition they think more carefully about the structure of the language so that may help them to learn carefully about English, that was what they said.

Sally Fantastic, well it’s almost time for another song and Jin we’ve got your choice which is ‘Pokarekare ana,’ a Māori folk song. I’m particularly interested to hear the story behind your choice, actually.

Jin I believed this song is a Korean folk song before I came to New Zealand because the lyrics are exactly the same. So that Māori song translates into Korean and we believe that passed on through the Korean War which was the WWII period of time. I was very amazed and I have really interesting episode because my husband and I were engaged with some maraes, powhiri at one stage and they ask my husband to sing a song and he actually sang that one and all of the elder Māori senior ladies were in tears because they thought it was so beautiful and emotional so I had a really interesting experience.

MUSIC – POKAREKARE ANASally Nau mai hoki mai, welcome back to “Speak Up” – “Korerotia”, you’re with

Sally Carlton, Anya, Jawad, Jin and Una and we’re talking about bi- and multilingualism in New Zealand. We’ve been speaking a little bit about the benefits - the cognitive, developmental, personal - all sorts of different benefits that can come from speaking multiple languages and I just thought it might be nice to touch on some of the pushback that we might get potentially from the children of migrants. Una, you mentioned that it’s different migrants speaking their own language or their children speaking their language. Is there any worry from the parents? Those sorts of things.

Anya Just to start, when we are talking about learning the language, in New Zealand, in Christchurch and I just want to say the community schools they play very important role in supporting the community with teaching the language. Many of our schools they actually exist for years and some people from our own community doesn’t know they exist. So for example, let’s say regarding to the benefit of languages, some kids from our community they be fluent in three languages no problem and it’s very high-level Russian, some language and English of course. What is specific about our community, because many of ours they came from the former Soviet Union, we had 15 different countries and different republics and different languages and it’s amazing, in New Zealand all those people… because the Russian language was the common language, they bring kids to our school to share our culture and they think it’s very precious and they are very proud of this.

Sally Anya you mentioned at the beginning that you’d done some research on the number of community language schools in Christchurch. How many have we got and what are those languages? You don’t have to list them all if you can’t remember.

Anya Yes there are around 25 schools but it was very important to see… You know we can organise a school but how they operate, who is the teachers? Because some people they can be a native speaker, some of them have qualifications, the teachers, but there are some very important things because first of all… All of our teachers, they are in New Zealand - they have to know the way the teachers teach in New Zealand, maybe people have a very high qualification back to their old country but it’s not… We have in New Zealand a different approach. For example in our

school I can come and touch kids and hug them and kiss them, some things they are not very common in New Zealand, we have to know the rules. Also that is why I think it is very important working together with the university and other organisations to create the programme so we can offer the teachers some courses they can have a qualification for community language teachers. In this case Australia has amazing experience for many years. The first school in Australia was established in 1839 or something like that so they have a big experience and very important I think all community schools they are working under umbrella of Minister of Education. It didn’t happen in New Zealand so far but I think it’s also very important.

Sally So you’re talking professional development for teachers.

Anya Absolutely.

Sally That’s a whole other conversation, isn’t it, because speaking a language doesn’t necessarily guarantee you can teach it. Interesting. Any feedback on that line of thinking?

Una I’ve been delighted and a number of my students have been delighted as well to go along to these sessions that Anya and her colleagues have been organising for the community language teachers and support them in some way. It’s been really interesting to meet these dedicated teachers and how very keen they are to develop their pedagogies so that’s been a wonderful experience.

Sally I would imagine almost all of them are probably doing it voluntarily.

Una Certainly some of them yes and as I said a lot of the problem then is with traditional ways of teaching perhaps that are quite different from the ways that the children have been taught in New Zealand schools. You do have cases then when the children might not want to go to the community language school. Whether or not they do that it’s very, very common that children will begin to answer their parents in English, the majority language, that is an almost universal phenomenon and there are different ways to deal with that and there are different strategies to deal with that and that’s one of the things that we have a little lecture with some tips on that on our website. But really my personal strategy - which I had the privilege of being in Europe so it wasn’t that far to reach the language community which as you said in New Zealand it is - I just took that child, left their Swedish daddy and Swedish friends at home and we went to Ireland for a week or two to get out of the majority language context and immersed them in the minority language. And that was a very good strategy and that worked for us but it’s not that easy for everybody.

Sally This ties into another point, the Russian community, the Farsi speaking community, the Korean community are relatively large in Christchurch. Relatively speaking. If you are coming from, for example, those little

villages you were talking about before in very remote Afghanistan where very few people speak that language, I imagine that must be even harder. You haven’t got, for example, the community schools, the community full stop around those children to give them socialisation opportunities. Any thoughts on that, that’s sort of even one step further in terms of difficulty.

Jawad Yes I agree with that, in the Middle East in general and Afghanistan in specific they are lots of those small… a village, maybe a city, speaking just one language which the rest of the country don’t speak. But they have found ways of finding a common language in the country like as Anya said, Russian has become the common language for all the previous Soviet Union Republics, then for example in Afghanistan they have found for example Farsi to communicate with the rest of the… So for them it’s even harder first because if they come here… In Afghanistan they had to learn Farsi, everything was based on Farsi; schooling and TV and radio mostly in Farsi so they had to learn and their language was spoken only in their home. And then if they come to New Zealand, although the numbers are maybe not a lot because there was not a lot in Afghanistan as well, so they are struggling, there is no community language for their language, common language back at home was Farsi so they have to stick with Farsi because they want to mingle with the rest of the Afghan migrants here.

So yes, it could be… Linking it back to your previous question, it could be a pushback from children because it’s three steps. First, at home they are speaking probably a language and I see this more from some of my Indian friends who have more local languages and they have probably a Hindi language spoken in the home country so they have to first learn their own which they don’t have, they don’t find a community language and then the bigger language which still they are struggling. Christchurch for example, as you said, they are not really supported, they are all voluntary work and it can be a lot of pushback from children that not really willing to go to those community language schools to learn… Adding to that problem is that most of us are not professional teachers and probably not qualified properly. Anya knows this community language more than me and knows how those schools are run so yes, I totally agree with you.

Una Great opportunity that there is nowadays that I didn’t have when I was raising my children and perhaps you didn’t have as much either, is that now that we have the web, we have a lot of digitally available material, children’s programmes, movies, music, audio books, all of these things are available even in relatively small languages which is a small resource. It just can turn things around. Also using technology, using perhaps iPad - a young child even can sit and chat with their grandparents in another country. They can take their iPad and put it into the Lego bit and build some Lego with Grandad, it’s fully possible, it just wasn’t before. So there’s every possibility to get some more access, the diaspora has become digital.

Jin I agree with Una because I believe language is related to culture and their identity so it is very important for children to speak their parents’ or heritage or community language somehow. So parents need to put more effort to make children to speak their heritage language at home but some minority communities, they are not big enough to facilitate all those facilities for these children but anyway, speaking their heritage language at home is the primary source for those children to learn their heritage language. So I think speaking community language, heritage language, whatever language, at home is very crucial.

Anya I just want to mention we are talking about the motivation, how we can motivate. We can’t say the child you must learn the language, it doesn’t work. I think the university is doing an amazing job to educate the parents, just telling them, “Look you have a such important task in your life to pass your language to your children” and I was amazed how many parents, young parents attended the seminars at the university.

Sally Anya, you touched on the idea of forcing or obliging children to do it and I guess this is a nice segway into an article I read just on the weekend in which Una was interviewed about the proposal to have compulsory te reo classes in New Zealand and this idea of making it obligatory for students to learn a language. Una, I’d be really interested to hear your thoughts on obliging students to learn a language.

Una Well yes, even in the home situation if you are going to make it meaningful for a young person to a learn a language, to speak a language, they have to have a need for it and that’s at home as well as in school. So if te reo is going to become compulsory in school then there becomes a need for it and that’s a reason… The same kind of need that there is to learn maths or English or geography, it’s part of their education, they need to get their qualifications, they need to get a job, depending on how it is done you might require a level of te reo to enter university. Previously, of course, New Zealand had a system where you needed to have a qualification in a foreign language to enter university, that’s gone and that’s really affected the number of people studying languages.

Sally How long ago was that?

Una Before my time!

Sally I just have one final question for this segment which is, we’ve been speaking about language being so tied to culture and identity and children and parents and sort of this intergenerational issue around languages, and I just wondered if you have noticed in your experience if children engaging more with English than with the parents’ language is having any cultural ramifications in the family? I’m thinking particularly around parental authority being challenged, those sorts of things.

Jin Yes I can share with my personal experience. I have two children but my oldest son made a strong statement once saying that, “Mum you should speak English because we live here in New Zealand, don’t speak Korean at home because it’s not good for you either.” So I was really concerned about the situation and then what happened was… That was when he was early teens but now he is over 20 now and his identity has changed since then because he was more into Kiwi-centred at that period of time but as he grew up he realised that even though he feels he is Kiwi, his friends or other people see him as Asian so that affected his self-identity development so now he is more into Korean so that made him learn more Korean language and it is more Korean food since then so now he is Korean/Kiwi.

Sally Interesting, isn’t it? Any other personal experience?

Una Yes. Children will often oppose the use of the language, the minority language at home and just as your son did, Jin, saying don’t speak that language to me or I’m a Kiwi, I don’t want to know about that stuff. “That’s old Grandma talk” I’ve heard somebody saying in an interview. But really we don’t let children decide important things in general, we don’t let them decide whether to walk on the footpath or on the road, we don’t let them decide whether to wear a hat if it’s cold or not, we make decisions for the children and especially things that the children really can’t see the consequences of and deciding not to speak the minority language, the home language at home has catastrophic consequences because once the parents stop talking it then it’s gone from the family.

Jin Exactly. So even though he made that strong statement, I just kept speaking Korean to him and now he is grateful. And some child participants from my study said that now they regret if they feel they are not very fluent bilingual so now they blame their parents, not push them to learn Korean language.

Una And we’ve never met anyone who regrets having been obliged to learn their heritage language.

Anya Probably need to talk about this more and more promote bilingualism and as I know according to our statistics all our students, they are very successful when they can speak two or three languages so in their career, everywhere that’s important.

Sally We are going to have our final song break now. Una you suggested a few but I’ve gone with Idas Sommervisa, a Swedish song?

Una It’s a Swedish song. It’s actually a song from the move version of Emil i Lönneberga which is one of the Astrid Lindgren’s stories and this is a song that’s sung at every end of school year and every summer in Sweden, it’s quite nostalgic for any Swedes listening.

MUSIC – IDAS SOMMERVISA

Sally You’re listening to “Speak Up” – “Kōrerotia” here on Plains FM 96.9. We’re with guests and we’re thinking about bi- and multilingualism in New Zealand and just to round up this conversation we’re going to think about how do you begin? Should you just start talking to a child in their first language and how does it change as that child gets older and starts to enter the English language society?

Una I would like to say very strongly: Please speak your language to your child from the very beginning, before they are born.

Jin I agree with Una because then children can feel the language has become part of their body so that’s what some child participant said, they don’t really think about two languages, it works just like they are in their brain so it can become part of themselves.

Sally That’s a nice comment, we talk about identity, about really it being kind of physically embodied as well, that’s really cool. And how about as a child gets older and they might have been exposed to their parents’ language for the first say two or three years of their life and then maybe they started pre-school or kindergarten and they start getting exposure to English as they meet playmates and teachers and then presumably that gets more and more as they start to spend more time at school. How does that affect the child’s linguistic development?

Anya I think children can speak many languages. In our experience, we have a sort of competition in Russian language and some kids, four year olds, five year olds, they can speak five, six languages. Not like answer a couple of questions but in some they can read, they can even write. So there are no limitations. In my advice don’t be afraid of teaching your child another language, full benefit for sure.

Sally We’ve been talking about it’s obviously very beneficial but how can we start to get the word out there? There’s obviously a dirth or lack of information.

Una I like to talk about an information desert. We actually found out by talking to midwives and doctors and nurses and even to speech and language therapists that they don’t have a lot of information in their education, they don’t have brochures ready to give out; you’d think they would to families who are expecting or who have a young child. Plunket nurses for example, they don’t have anything to give. So that’s something we’ve been trying to produce to a certain extent, some material for professionals but it’s difficult so we’ve been trying to make our material web-based so that it’s accessible even for people who can’t come out to our workshops and public lectures.

Sally Are you finding as well that there’s any false information out there?

Una We’re finding some misleading information. For example the Office of Ethnic Affairs had a report in 2013 which ended up by suggesting that

migrants should consider speaking English to their children and in fact what they really wanted to say was that it’s really important that migrants learn English so that they can get out to work. The message was a little muddled and that’s really unfortunate if migrants think that they are doing their children a favour by speaking English because they’re doing them a disservice, their children will not thank them when they’re older when they haven’t given them the language and that’s even if it’s a very small language.

Anya It’s a shame because there are so much information and experienced people who can share their knowledge and teach kids, people don’t use them. Let’s come to the community schools. And I think another step: the community schools should go to the schools in Christchurch to promote the language, the beauty of the language.

Una Another thing is Anya, you talk about teaching the language - and of course that’s what the community language schools do - but sometimes parents come up to us and say but I’m not a good teacher, I can’t give my child my language and parents don’t actually teach children their language, they just use the language with the children and that’s how we learn our first languages, it’s that simple, you don’t need to be a teacher.

Sally It comes back to what Jin was saying about it being kind of embodied, doesn’t it?

Una It’s the most natural thing in the world to talk to a child, you just do it in your own language. You don’t need to think about grammatical rules.

Jin And by doing that children learn their parents’ cultural factors and beliefs and values.

Sally That’s so important, particularly when they are isolated from it, being here. Now, just to finish off: on the 21st of February its Mother Language Day and we’re sort of holding this conversation in honour of that event. And Anya, you are involved in an event at Hagley Community College this coming Saturday the 18th of February which is all about encouraging people to speak multiple languages. So if you want to give just a little bit of a plug that would be great.

Anya Yes please - come and share the beauty of your language, we want to listen to your language and please read the poetry or just come and listen to others share with us, everything that you want to share in your language.

Sally Hopefully this sort of event as well and the seminars that the university are holding might be ways of getting people more engaged and more informed about what is going on. Just to finish off, I wondered if any of you have a saying or a quote in your own languages that tie in with this conversation we’ve been having today around the importance of language, identity, culture? I thought that might be a really beautiful way

of finishing off.

Jin Maybe I can start. I’m not too sure whether this is a Korean saying or from western culture but it’s quite common to say that language is a mirror of yourself.

Sally And in Korean?

Jin 2:44

Sally Beautiful. Any one in Farsi?

Jawad I had one in mind, it was a bit radical so I decided not to because it doesn’t really talk about keeping your identity, it’s basically disregarding or negating following other culture without considering your own culture, well the topic was more about keeping your own identity rather than following other cultures so that’s why I decided not to…

Sally It sounds quite pertinent for migrants though, I would imagine, you being surrounded by somebody else’s culture so trying to stay true to your own values and your own culture as well as embracing the new culture.

Anya I have my favourite, I can’t remember…. But in Russian it is 1:33 - so many times you are a human being, it depends how many languages do you know.

Sally Perfect, anything from Ireland? Sweden?

Una Unfortunately for a number of historical reasons I don’t actually speak Irish but I can take something from Sweden which is my second language because I lived 30 years there and 1:00 - and literally it means that small pots also have handles or ears is the word in Swedish. So small pots have ears; so small children also have ears so don’t forget that the children hear what you say and of course that’s used to don’t say anything that you shouldn’t say that’s inappropriate but I’d like to turn it around and say please speak to your children because they are listening.

Sally Well that seems like the ideal way to finish up this conversation then, so I’d like to say thank you all so much for coming in, it’s been a really, really interesting conversation and I hope that this can hopefully generate a bit more thinking, a bit more debate around the importance of speaking multiple languages in a society that is very monolingual.